Optima dies
("prima fugit?")
I had a fantastic day on Saturday. In the morning, I joined the Defective By Design anti-DRM protest at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. You can see me in several of Quinn's photographs -- I'm wearing a blue shirt and holding up a somewhat wind-battered sign that quotes Steve Jobs on our right to use music "on all other devices that [we] own". (Thanks for reminding me that Steve Jobs said that, Don.) I am also one of the few people not wearing a hazmat suit.
That protest was attended by Jon Johansen (who has just moved to San Francisco) and his friend Monique, and I ended up having a delicious lunch with them, Praveen, John Gilmore, and someone named Serge over at Tu Lan.
The protest was remarkably mellow; Apple had one security guard who was polite and respectful to us, a fair number of employees reading our signs and gossiping about us, and customers going in and out and frequently taking flyers. Nobody harassed us or called the police. This is a nice contrast with another anti-DRM protest I participated in in the Fourth and Market area a few years ago -- at the Sony Metreon when the first lawsuits were filed over DeCSS. I think the San Francisco Apple protest was mellow on all sides; we neglected to chant anything.
After lunch, I got to see my friend Michelle for a little while; we visited Josh's cat, and then we took BART to the East Bay together.
In Oakland I met my friends from the Cena Latina and went off to the North Bay for an excellent Cena at the home of a Latin teacher friend who is using the modus vivus (immersion teaching) and teaching out of Ørberg's Lingua Latina Per Se Explicata. We met one of his students, a high school sophomore who speaks fantastic Latin and who has the good fortune to be headed to Rome this summer to study Latin there. After dinner, we played a game called Rapio, the Latin version of Grabble. I finally had an opportunity to use my Latin anagramming and word visualization skill -- heretofore always useless in English-language Boggle games -- and I won by a pretty decent margin. But my opponents were extremely worthy and made some brilliant plays.
John Piazza talked about creating a Latin-speaking bicycle club in Oakland called SBQR (Societas Bi Quercopolis Rotarum), a hilarious example of tmesis (from "Societas Quercopolis Birotarum", lit. "Oakland Bicycle Society"). If you don't get the joke, see also SPQR. I would totally join.
On BART on my way to and from Oakland, I read about historical linguistics.
